American Indians and Chicago in the Nineteenth Century

More than any event in Chicago history, save the fire of 1871, the Fort Dearborn "Massacre" defines Chicago identity. Although this event occurred on the American frontier—during the War of 1812, which was fought between the United States and Britain on Potawatomi territory—the city of Chicago took the story as its own. It helped support both the rugged individualism of the American character and the belief that Americans inexorably wrested this area away from the British and the Indians. With this narrative of conquest, Chicagoans could legitimately claim this area as their own. Or so they thought.

The story of the "massacre" became one of legend and lore for the emerging metropolis of Chicago. By the end of the nineteenth century it grew to mythic proportions, retold for the masses in numerous dime-store novels. The myth grew to the extent that the industrialist George Pullman commissioned a massive public sculpture by the famed artist Carl Rohl-Smith to be placed next to the Pullman mansion in the South Loop. The completed monument features two American Indians: one trying to kill a white woman and the other trying to save her. Rohl-Smith, in designing the sculpture, wanted "real" Indians to model for his work. He was in luck—he found them at Fort Sheridan, north of the city.

In February 1891 a Sioux delegation of more than forty prisoners of war came to Illinois from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. They were brought in the wake of the U.S. Army's attack on Lakota civilians and religious celebrants at Wounded Knee the previous December. The delegation was divided into two parts. One group stayed in Chicago for several days and then traveled on to Washington DC, while the other group was held as "guests of the government"—a euphemism for prisoners of war—at Fort Sheridan. There the corrupt South Dakota politician M. H. Day referred to them as "murderers."

The group that was held at Fort Sheridan included Short Bull, whom the sculptor Carl Rohl-Smith purportedly believed looked like a "typical Indian." The local Potawatomi Indians did not look Indian enough for Rohl-Smith to depict in a seminal event in Chicago history. Instead, Rohl-Smith selected the Lakota man to model the Potawatomi Black Partridge saving Mrs. Linai Helm at Fort Dearborn, in what would become the iconic Chicago monument. Already, Plains Indians represented the archetypical Indian image for white America. The Rohl-Smith sculpture was emblematic of the portrayal of Chicago's Native history that would dominate the consciousness of Chicagoans at the beginning of the twentieth century. In a foreshadowing of future conditions, Indians were placed in a dichotomous situation of being both allies and untrustworthy "others" in relation to non-Native Chicagoans.

Growth of a City on Indian Resources

D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark reminds us that "in order to be truthful, any telling of how Illinois was made—in narrative or in embodied form—certainly must include candor about how the state was cleansed of its unwanted Indians." Chicago grew as a city on American Indian lands and with resources acquired from American Indian tribes both from around Lake Michigan and from the prairies. American Indians had lived in the area for thousands of years and maintained a presence throughout. As a result of the treaties that ceded what became Illinois to the United States, several Indian families retained pieces of land in and surrounding Chicago, although no reservation was established within the state's borders. In addition, Indian people passed through or came to the city throughout the nineteenth century. In various ways Chicago remained Indian Country to the Indian people who stayed there, visited, or moved to the city.

Chicago is located where the Chicago River had emptied into Lake Michigan until the city's engineers reversed its flow, sending its effluence to the interior river system and eventually to the Mississippi River in 1900. The area was swampy, and the name for Chicago in the Miami language translates to "wild onions" or "wild garlic," also known as skunk weed. Historically, the region served as a trading center and provided village sites for various tribes, including the Miamis and the Winnebagoes. The Menominee have ancient stories connecting them to the place that is now Chicago—it served, for example, as the southern goal in a lacrosse game played by their supernatural heroes. The tribal group most associated with the area in the years immediately preceding American arrival was the Potawatomi.

Over a period of four decades, the encroaching American settler population, using warfare and the U.S. legal system, eradicated American Indian title to all of the lands in the Chicago area and removed nearly all of the Indian people living there from their homelands. Between 1795 and 1833 five treaties dealt with land cessions in Chicago. The 1795 Treaty of Greenville signed in the wake of General "Mad Anthony" Wayne's 1794 victory at Fallen Timbers included cession of an area that is now downtown Chicago, where Fort Dearborn would be built in 1803.

In 1812, after war broke out between the Americans and the British, some five hundred tribal members, primarily Potawatomis and a smaller number of Ottawas, attacked the American stronghold, killing fifty-one and causing the rest of the military to surrender.

Potawatomi bands and leaders were autonomous, however, and Black Partridge sided with the Americans, honoring an agreement that he had made many years before to keep peace. He warned the U.S. command of the attack, returned a peace medal he had previously been given (because of his failure to keep the peace), and, in an event dramatically captured in Rohl-Smith's sculpture some eighty years later, saved Margaret Helm, whose husband, Linai, was an officer at the fort, "by warding off an Indian seeking to tomahawk her," according to historian Virgil J. Vogel.

Much later (near the time of the creation of the sculpture), Simon Pokagon would describe this event from a Potawatomi perspective: "In their loyal zeal they could not comprehend their own weakness and the strength of the dominant race, but, being pressed onward by as noble motives as ever glowed in the breast of mortals, they fought most desperately for home and native land. When white men pillaged and burned our villages and slaughtered our families, they called it honorable warfare, but when we retaliated, they called it butchery and murder."

In 1816, in one of a series of treaties that the...